Monday, 11 January 2016

DIY Cat Zentangle

Hello again and happy New Year :)

Today I want to show you my first Zentangle piece. I'm not really a great painter or anything but after watching some amazing videos by Ashley Picanco and Jessie Chou I decided to give it a try. I don't know if I mentioned it before but I have a cat, her name is Frieda. As I already have some amazing art of my old cat created by my friend, I thought it would be time to add some pictures of our new family member. So I made a cat Zentangle.
It wasn't as hard as I thought to be honest but I also cheated a little ;)
So I think you can recreate it easily :)

At first I chose some pictures of Frieda where she looks into the camera and made some sketches. As I said I'm not really good at drawing, so I cheated. I resized them on my computer and traced the outline of the cat faces in pencil, at first on a very small scale. Then I used a marker to trace them in black. I then practiced and filled in the first cat face with patterns.

Here are my first attempts:

sketches for my zentangle drawing

I decided that the first face looked best and therefore chose to use this one for my drawing.

This is the photo I used. Look at her, isn't she cute? :)

our cat Frieda

I enlarged the photo on my laptop and traced it again on a larger scale that would fit my frame.

Here is my drawing in pencil. I hope you can see:

I then drew some lines like I did above in my sketch to divide the face into sections. I tried to use the natural lines in her face.

Then I filled in the sections with patterns. After watching all of the Zentangle videos by Jessie (ZentangleWithJessie) and Ashley (Zentangle For Beginners) I had practiced the patterns I liked in my sketch book to use them for projects later on.

Here an example of my sketches:

zentangle practice

I then used my favourite patterns in my drawing. Here I cheated again (of course :D) and drew everything in pencil at first. I know that real Zentangle artists are not supposed to do that but since I'm not really spontaneous when ist comes to those things and since it's my drawing after all I did it in pencil first. After that I traced everything again with a black pen and made the outline of the cat a bit darker.

And here is the final result.
I really like how it turned out, it's exactly how I wanted it :) I was even allowed to put it up on the wall :D